This volume provides informed arguments, theory and practical examples based on research about what it looks like when educators, policy makers, and even students, try to rethink and change their practices by engaging in evidence-based conversations to challenge and inform their work. It allows the reader to experience these conversations. Each story reveals the depth of thinking that change requires and gives important insights into the challenge associated with changing thinking and practice. Some of the stories are encouraging and others are frustrating. Taken together, they give tremendous insight into what it takes for conceptual change that will fundamentally shift educational practice.

Today's school leaders are faced with the increasingly daunting task of leading their schools to improve, to innovate and to become ever more responsive to change. There are many resources to help schools to engage with improvement frameworks, but few that directly address the complexity of the challenges that inevitably arise along the way. Based on extensive research in the field, including the outcomes of a five-year project on school improvement and professional learning in Australia and New Zealand, Leading Professional Learning: Practical Strategies for Impact in Schools identifies the challenges that school leaders face when leading professional learning and development in their schools as part of an improvement agenda. Renowned professional development expert, Helen Timperley, has collaborated with a team of prominent authors, including Fiona Ell, Deidre Le Fevre and Kaye Twyford, to uncover the reasons underpinning these challenges and to provide practical strategies on how to address them. Case studies, excerpts from real teachers' experiences and step-by-step examples of useful strategies, including the spiral of inquiry, give school leaders the tools they need to tackle complex challenges in teaching, learning, curriculum delivery and pedagogical practice in both primary and secondary settings. Leading Professional Learning: Practical Strategies for Impact in Schools is a hands-on resource for school leaders to identify specific professional learning and development issues that accompany the learning and change process and to overcome them in their schools.

This volume provides informed arguments, theory and practical examples based on research about what it looks like when educators, policy makers, and even students, try to rethink and change their practices by engaging in evidence-based conversations to challenge and inform their work. It allows the reader to experience these conversations. Each story reveals the depth of thinking that change requires, showing that change requires new learning and new learning is hard.

Teacher professional development is often promoted as a panacea for improving schools but it rarely lives up to its promise. This book develops an approach to professional learning that has motivated teachers and resulted in impressive improvements in student learning, particularly for students who traditionally underachieve in school. As the underpinning research shows, the approach has proven successful in several countries with consistently positive outcomes.

The book begins by identifying the shifts that need to happen for the power of professional learning to be realized in promoting student engagement, learning and well-being. Some shifts in thinking include: Moving from professional development to professional learning Putting student learning at the heart of professional learning Focusing on the knowledge and skills to be learned rather than the forms of delivery Focusing on the double-demand of being both immediately practical and developing underlying principles so that new problems can be solved in the future At the heart of the book is an inquiry and knowledge building cycle for teachers that is central to realizing the power of professional learning. The cycle is underpinned by research on how people learn and what it means to be a professional. Later chapters identify what leaders in schools and beyond can do to support teacher learning in ways that directly benefit students. Throughout the book there are case examples of real experiences of primary and secondary teachers and leaders across three countries (UK, Canada and New Zealand) that bring alive what it means to engage in professional learning in ways that excite teachers and benefit their students.

This is essential reading for teachers who want to take control of their own professional learning in ways that make a difference to their students and school leaders with responsibility for promoting professional and student learning.